Upper Austria General Medical Council: Doctor finder online and mobile

Upper Austria General Medical Council: Doctor finder - online and mobile

Where can I find the nearest eye specialist who has office hours this next Monday and accepts my health insurance?

The Doctor Finder, from the Upper Austrian Medical Association (Ärztekammer für Oberösterreich), provides the answers to such questions. A multitude of search criteria enable the user to precisely find the closest, most suitable medical care.

The Upper Austrian Medical Association is the legal special interest group of doctors in Upper Austria. Their goal is to offer everyone in Upper Austria efficient and modern health care. Amongst these tasks are the optimisation of training and working conditions of doctors, the structure of medical care, as well as comprehensive patient information. This was the reason that the Upper Austrian Medical Association expanded its service offering with the aid of map-based solutions by WIGeoGIS.

A central application is the Doctor Finder, which is based on WIGeoGIS’s NextDoor technology. It has already been in existence since 2002 and offers a highly differentiated—with regard to content—spatial vicinity search. Based on one’s location, the nearest doctors can be found according to criteria such as specialisation, additional areas of expertise and special training, as well as gender or foreign language knowledge. Concrete contact information as well as the option to calculate the route from the current location to the selected doctor simplify making and keeping appointments.

Even greater timeliness of data

Certain data for doctors can be published by the Medical Association. Yet vastly more information that make a differentiated search possible require the clearance of the particular doctor. In order to guarantee quick adaptation and the greatest possible timeliness of the contents, the Upper Austrian Medical Association plans to offer its members its own web-based editing system.

The management and adjustment of office hours and specialist data for every doctor is thereby possible around the clock, and doctors thus gain full control over their content in the Doctor Finder.

Future perspectives

Lastly, a revised web version of the Doctor Finder was released in order to match the Upper Austrian Medical Association’s latest corporate design, and the service was simultaneously adapted. The Doctor Finder now works optimally with mobile phones with internet access, for which a special web interface is offered.